The New York Times has not just written about the CSIRO cuts but also editorialised against them, attributing them to “a deplorable misunderstanding of the importance of basic research into what is arguably the greatest challenge facing the planet.”

This piece was published in Guardian Australia on Tuesday 17 February 2015.

Good government, Tony Abbott told us, started last Monday. It was a short-lived experiment. By Thursday, we were subjected to the undignified spectacle of the prime minister and his senior colleagues throwing punches over the release by the Human Rights Commission of a report on children in immigration detention.